Renewing America's economy, reducing the threat of global climate change, and finally securing the nation's energy independence all compel the transformation of the U.S. energy system. The nation that moves first to develop and harness new energy technologies will
take the lead in the next powerful growth sector of the 21st century. Meeting this imperative and capturing the energy opportunity requires new federal policies to rapidly develop and deploy clean, affordable, and scalable U.S. energy technologies. It is time to invest in new American energy and
make clean energy cheap.
Public investment is the cornerstone of an effective strategy for American energy innovation and modernization. We propose a role for government that is both limited and direct and that draws on
America's bipartisan history of successful federal investment to catalyze the technology innovation performed by universities, the U.S. military, private corporations, and entrepreneurs alike.
Time and again, when confronted with compelling national innovation priorities, the United States has summoned the resources necessary to secure American technological leadership by investing in breakthrough science and world-class innovation. The United States responded vigorously to the Soviet launch of Sputnik by investing the resources necessary to ensure American innovators, entrepreneurs, and firms would lead the world in aerospace, IT, and computing technologies, igniting prosperous new industries in the process. Today, we invest $30 billion annually in pursuit of new cures to deadly diseases and new biomedical innovations and devote more than $80 billion annually to military innovations that can help secure our borders.
We propose
a similar national commitment to energy sciences and
education, which have languished without the funding deserving of a national innovation priority. At the same, based on what we know about successful public-private partnerships to build and strengthen regional hubs of innovation, such as the one that evolved into Silicon Valley, we propose investment in
a national network of regional energy innovation clusters consisting of universities, entrepreneurs, private investors, and technology companies.
We must also fundamentally rethink the way we subsidize the deployment of emerging clean energy technologies, ensuring that these policies effectively reward and explicitly demand continual improvement in price and performance, so that emerging clean energy technologies can ultimately compete with fossil fuels without permanent subsidy. Today's federal incentives -- whether for solar and wind or ethanol and nuclear -- are structured around scale and quantity, not innovation.
A strategy to make clean energy cheap builds on the successes of military procurement to purchase and prove advanced energy systems while providing competitive markets for emerging energy technologies, which can facilitate mass manufacture, demand progressive innovation, and bring down the real, unsubsidized cost of clean and secure energy alternatives.
Key Documents:
- "Post-Partisan Power" (Policy Report)
(October, 2010)
- "Where Good Technologies Come From: Case Studies in American Innovation" (Case Study)
(PDF, 998kb, December 2010)
- "Jump-starting a Clean Energy Revolution..." (Policy Recommendations Brief)
(PDF, 335kb, September 2009)
- The Emerging Climate Consensus: Global Warming Policy in a Post-Environmental World
(PDF, 540KB, April 2009)
- "Fast, Clean, & Cheap: Cutting Global Warming's Gordian Knot"
(PDF, 208KB, January 2008, Harvard Law & Policy Review)
- "National Energy Education Act Overview" (PDF, 261KB, October 2008)
- More...
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